Share Your FIRST Story at Championship!

One of the best parts of our jobs is the opportunity to see how someone’s life may have been positively impacted by participating in a FIRST program. We love to receive letters, meet people at events and read about our alumni in the news. This year, we’re going to take this one step further and capture some of these testimonials on video. In St. Louis, you might encounter a video crew interviewing folks for personal stories about the FIRST experience. Some will be planned, some will be more impromptu. In the meantime, let us know if you have a FIRST story to share by completing this brief form: http://goo.gl/yfm5F. At this time, we’ll only be conducting recordings at Championship but we’re always interested in collecting testimonials, so get in touch and consider sharing your incredible FIRST story. We’re interested in hearing from participants of all programs, including alumni and volunteers!

Preliminary Championship Match Schedules

The 2013 FRC Season has been one of ‘trying things out’ – a new award, a new kit option, a new way to get to Championship. We have something else we’re going to try out, and that’s getting the teams preliminary match schedules for Championship in advance of the event.

Please read the sentences below three times before moving on to the rest of this post:

These schedules are preliminary. We don’t think they will change, but they may. Do not use these preliminary schedules at Championship. You will be receiving official schedules at Championship that are not marked ‘Preliminary’, in the same way as you have every year.

These schedules will change if, for example, a team unexpectedly does not show up (it’s rare, but it’s happened), or for some other circumstance we can’t predict right now.

We’re considering the release of these preliminary schedules for the 2013 Championship a pilot. If the schedule changes, and we have too many teams coming up to Pit Admin with a schedule marked ‘Preliminary’ in their hands, confused about the change, this will be an indication to me that we shouldn’t continue this for 2014. (As a side note, I know that sometimes discussions with Pit Admin can get heated. Please be nice to our staff and volunteers at Pit Admin, they really are trying to help!)

The preliminary practice and preliminary qualification match schedules are below.

NOTE: The preliminary practice schedules are for Thursday morning, 4/25. The preliminary qualification schedules start at 1PM on Thursday, 4/25, and go through the morning of Saturday, 4/27. The first match for every division on Saturday starts at 8:15AM. The days are not indicated on these preliminary schedules, but we will work to improve that formatting for next season.

It seems that there are teams with 7 matches when others in the division have 8, whitout them being surrogates in any of the matches. Examples are team 67 in Curie and 111 in Galileo. Why is that, and how will that be resolved? This basically allows teams to be seeded lower than teams they outperformed (in points).

Having only 8 matches allows way too much luck to push undeserving teams into the top 8 seed spots. That weakens the quality of the Eliminatiom Matches. It also weakens the value compared to the cost to attend the Championships.
Please consider adding more time to the schedule to allow 150 matches per Division so each team gets 9 matches. We can tolerate shorter meal breaks since each team can eat between their matches. Having everyone at the same meal break time causes too many people at once at the concessions and a lack of places to eat. It bottlenecks all the food distribution.

I linked to the chief delphi post about the your blog post. I know your piloting a new idea. But a lot of teams have an issue with only getting 8 matches. Our team raises 14-20k to go to champs for ony 8 matches. The past few years we've gotten 9-10. 8 is really unacceptable.

We're watching the matches here at Aviation HS and are looking forward to supporting our Skunks remotely (Team 1983). The preliminary schedule Curie doesn't appear to match the alliances being played. Is there any place to find the final schedule online? Many thanks!